Paul Guinan

Inkpot award–winning artist Paul Guinan's comic book career is a series of firsts. He began at First Comics, retouching the first manga translation published in the United States, Lone Wolf and Cub. While at First, he co-created Cargonauts, a precursor to Firefly. With his wife, Anina Bennett, Paul created the first female action hero series in comics, Heartbreakers, which was also the first comic to be supplemented by a computer database. His innovative digital art, “paintography,” was nominated for an Eisner Award in Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate (2005). Paul also co-created the monthly series Chronos for DC Comics, which inspired parts of the network TV show Legends of Tomorrow. In 2000 he created Boilerplate, a website about a mechanical soldier invented in 1893. In 2009 Paul again joined forces with Anina to produce a coffee-table book about the robot’s exploits, Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel. Universally lauded as “a masterpiece” (The Telegraph UK) and “a delight” (LA Times), Boilerplate is in development as a feature film produced by J.J. Abrams. Paul and Anina followed that up with Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, a steampunk faux biography that resurrects and re-imagines a vintage dime novel science hero, featuring restored illustrations unseen for more than a century. Frank Reade has been praised as “a rollicking retrofuturist visual feast” (The Wall Street Journal) and “meticulously crafted” (The Atlantic). Paul is currently working on the graphic novel series Aztec Empire, a non-fiction epic about the conquest of Mexico. It tells a true yet surreal tale that has yet to be fully realized in comic books, movies, or TV.